Two significant watercolours by Italian painter Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754–1821), a man renowned for his involvement in the removal and shipping of the Elgin Marbles to England, are to go on sale in New York.

The Scottish National Gallery displayed the paintings last year as part of their exhibition 'Expanding Horizons - Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape'.

Rome-born Lusieri was one of very few Italian artists to have adopted watercolour as their favoured medium.Telegraph Art Critic Richard Dorment called him "a minor master" and "technical genius". The latter part of Lusieri’s career was spent mainly in Athens as Lord Elgin’s resident artist and agent. In that capacity he was closely involved in supervising the removal and shipping of the celebrated marbles from the Acropolis, now in the British Museum.

The two paintings will go on sale at Master Drawings New York later this month. They were only recognised as being works of Lusieri when they were purchased by James Mackinnon. In 1821, the ship carrying the greater part of Luseri’s production in Greece and a collection of classical sculpture for Elgin sank during a storm.

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Of his works in Greece, only one major watercolour (in the Elgins collection) and an oil (in National Gallery of Scotland, also discovered by James Mackinnon) of the same subject are known today. These two works are a part of his very rare Italian work and were acquired from the collection of Pauline Louise Harrison, daughter of Francis Henry Du Pont.